Dave Lauer is a former-high frequency trader for firms such as Citadel and Allston Trading. He’s worked specifically in various areas of the HFT pipeline, including; research and modelling, building hardware, and programming and operating strategies—which are measured in millionths of a second (or microseconds).

Following the Flash Crash, Dave left his role as a trader (for various reasons we discuss during this episode) and now, as a partner of KOR Group, consults to institutional managers on market structure and best execution.

Dave was also featured in the VPRO documentary, The Wall Street Code, along with other Chat With Traders guests; Haim Bodek, Eric Hunsader, and Blair Hull.

--

Sponsored by TechnicianApp.com: Chart, analyze, and trade from anywhere with Technician’s award-winning app—for mobile, tablet, and desktop. Learn more and sign up for free!

This week on the podcast, I spoke with Tom Sosnoff, who many of you will already know—he’s pretty close to a household name name in this industry. But if you don’t…

Tom was a floor trader at the CBOE for 20 years, later going on to co-found thinkorswim—a widely popular online brokerage. In 2009, thinkorswim was sold to TD Ameritrade for approximately $606M, and Tom left the company shortly after to start financial news show, tastytrade.

In this episode we hit on; the issue with being too risk adverse in markets and in life, Tom’s extensive trading career, plenty of talk about options, the value of intellectually challenging ourselves (with respect to finance), and more.

--

Sponsored by TechnicianApp.com – Technician is a free-to-use charting and analysis platform, built for mobile, web and desktop. Visit TechnicianApp.com to sign up and try it out!

Jared Tendler is an internationally recognized mental game coach. His clients include world champion poker players, the #1 ranked pool player in the world, professional golfers, and more recently, traders too.

If Jared was to summarize exactly what he does (and what he specializes in), it would be; removing negative and excessive emotion from decision making.

So naturally, this serves as the underlying theme throughout our conversation, but we also discuss higher-level topics like; variance, the major crossovers between high-stakes poker and trading, how psychology has been oversold and when it really matters, plus how to identify various types of “tilt.”

Blair Hull has been labeled by Forbes as, “One of the most successful traders of the last 40 years,” and he was also profiled in Jack Schwager’s, The New Market Wizards.

Prior to trading, Blair was a serious Blackjack player for 5-years during the 70’s. From there he took his winnings to the the Pacific Exchange to trade mispriced options, and in 1985, he founded one of the world’s premier market-making firms, Hull Trading.

At its peak, Hull Trading was active on 28 exchanges in nine countries. Then in 1999, the firm was acquired by Goldman Sachs for $531 million dollars.

Listening to this interview, you’re going to hear more about Blair’s career and his observations as a trader, why he believes great things happen in teams, and why everything revolves around having an edge.

This episode features Dr. Yves Hilpisch—the founder of The Python Quants.

TPQ do a lot of good for those involved in quantitative finance, they; frequently host meet-ups and workshops, have developed platforms and analytics libraries, and often contract to exchanges, banks and hedge funds for custom Python development.

Yves is also a three-time published author, with his most notable title probably being “Python for Finance” which was released through O’Reilly. He regularly gives presentations and speaks at events on the subject of quant finance, and lectures at Universities too.

Over the next sixty minutes, you’ll hear us unpack many subjects related to being a quant and why programming in Python can be a useful skill to have in your toolbox.

Note, some of the discussion in the later part may be a little heavy for non-programmers. So if there is something that doesn’t make sense or you’d like more context around, please just write in the comments at the bottom of this page and I’ll do my best to point you in the right direction.